Jupiter Broadcasting TUI challenge

Goals and plan

I'm entirely comfortable using a text only environment. My interest here is not so much meeting the various aspects of the challenge but rather than to share some of the things I've done that others may find interesting.

Listening to the podcast announcement (linked above) It also seems that the JB folk have identified a "text only" sub-culture that they're tapping into for the tools that they plan to use. As such, I may explore that to the extent I can. I'll keep my notes here and score at the end.

Cheating: I started some of these things a couple weeks ago with some particularly interesting (to me) text based solutions so I'll share those even though they don't fit within the timeline of the challenge.

Back Story

My first PC was a Heathkit H8 running CP/M and using a serial terminal interface. The "native interface" on this PC was a numeric keypad which could be used to program the PC by entering octal opcodes and data to memory. Using the Heathkit text terminal was a huge step forward! My next PC was a full 32 bit machine - 80386 - running SCO Linux (before SCO was a bad word.) It too was text based as I could barely afford that, let alone the extra cost for the GUI environment. But I could switch between consoles and do multiple things at once. Those were the days of fetching programs from comp.sources.unix to build the tools I wanted but I did not have the chops nor the display H/W to build Xfree86. My first GUI based host ran OS/2 and eventually I discovered and learned to love Linux.